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Friday, November 06, 2009

Click on the post-it to head over to Conversion Diary's quick-takes gathering place.

I find that a number of great quotations from Bishop Sheen have found their way into my notebook. So I present them here for you to run deliciously through your fingers.

(1) Truth must be sought at all costs, but separate isolated truths will not do. Truth is like life; it has to be taken on its entirety or not at all. . . . We must welcome truth even if it reproaches and inconveniences us -- even if it appears in the place where we thought it could not be found.

(2) Nothing is more harmful to a man than his resistance to Grace.

(3) So much do the will and its sin become wedded together that a soul will say, "Let me alone. I made my bed and I will lie in it."

(4) Those who hate Truth and fear Goodness are not far from the kingdom of God. They are fighting against it, and yet they know theirs is a losing battle. The more violently men hate truth, the more they think about it; the more they fear the goodness that demands perfection, the more they know it is what they really seek.

(5) Once we accept him, we find we were truly deceived. It was only the skin of the heavenly fruit that seemed bitter. The meat ravishes the soul. . . At first glance, God seems to be taking away our happiness, but in the moment of surrender we discover he has deceived us. He has merely taken away the dross to give us the gold of his eternity.

(6) Sin was the act by which man refused to see created things for what they were -- stepping stones to God, a means to an end -- and began instead to clutch at them as ends in themselves. That is what sin is, still. As a man loves his sense of humor when he cannnot see the point of a pun, so he loses his humor in its entirety when he ceases to see the point of the universe, which is that all things are revelations, symbols, reminders of God who made them. To take things as ends in themselves is to overrate them, treating them with a solemnity which is not warranted.

(7) Every person carries in his heart the blueprint of the one he loves.